The Most Important Part
by Jaylynik
Summary: Chronicles of Narnia, early during the reign of Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy. Lucy teaches Tumnus a card game from back home, and they enjoy each other's company. Simply a short, sliceoflife fic.


**The Most Important Part**

Cair Paravel was, from the outside, quite grand, and so was much of the inside. But something that has been understood by most _true_ kings and queens of Narnia, stretching all the way back to King Frank I and Queen Helen, is that it was also quite important for any home (and Cair Paravel was home to many) to contain a number of rooms that were less on the scale of grand and more on the scale of comfortable.

Queen Lucy the Golden, known simply as Lucy to her dearest friends, sat across from one of her dearest and oldest friends of all. The fire crackled warmly, providing enough light to see by without so much to be intruding, as Lucy removed the Queen of Leaves from her deck of cards and explained, "The game, if I remember correctly, is called Old Maid. I seem to remember we played it from time to time on rainy days... before."

Lucy trailed off as she shuffled. She still had vague memories of the days before she had come to Narnia, but they felt, mostly, like scraps of a dream, an unreal life lived by someone else. The game had come back to her recently, and she had decided to use it as an excuse to spend the evening in the company of Mr. Tumnus (not that they needed an excuse, but it didn't hurt).

"Old Maid!" answered the faun, eager to learn. "Very good, very good. And how does one play Old Maid?"

Lucy began passing the cards out, one to Tumnus, one to her, and so on until all the cards were dealt. She smiled a bit sheepishly at the goat-man. "These are going to be rather big hands. But we should be able to thin them out a lot, right away. You see, the purpose is to make pairs. Go through your cards, and take out any pairs and set them on the table, then keep the rest in your hand and don't show me."

"Does color matter?" Tumnus asked as he began removing pairs. "Green with green, grey with grey?"

"I think in some games it does," Lucy answered as she, too, began removing her pairs and setting them aside. "But not for us." To emphasize, Lucy paired a Three of Claws with a Three of Crowns, placing them with the rest of her pairs.

Mr. Tumnus nodded, and paired a Five of Picks with a Five of Leaves. After only a few more pairings, he was done. He looked up at Lucy expectantly.

"Next, you take one of my cards from my hand, without looking at what they are." As Lucy said this, she fanned her hand out so Tumnus could choose. "If it matches a card in your hand, it's a pair and you set it with the others. Then, I pick a card from your hand and do the same, and this goes on until the only card left is the unmatched Queen. She's the Old Maid, and whoever has her, looses."

Tumnus frowned and his brows drew together; a quizzical expression overtook his face. "But... why would that be? She's a Queen, isn't she?"

Lucy tilted her head to consider this. It wasn't something she really thought much of before. After a few moments, however, she gave it up and cast a look of appeal in Tumnus's direction. "I don't know, actually. It's... just the way the game is played."

The faun shrugged then, and plucked a card from the many that Lucy fanned out. "No matter, then." He looked at the card, and brightened, then matched the seven with another in his hand. Then he fanned his own hand out. "Your turn now, isn't it?"

And so it went. The two enjoyed playing very much, even though, when it comes to it, Old Maid was a rather silly choice of games when there are only two players. In the end, the company was more important than the game.

**End.**

_Author's Notes: Written as part of a fanfic meme. I had the option of choosing between the following prompts:_

_1. __Fleetwind + bath (Fleetwind is a Transformers OC of mine)_

_2. I want Lucy to teach Mr. Tumnus how to play Old Maid._

_Obviously, I went with Old Maid._

_This is the only Narnia fanfic I've ever written. I love Narnia, have role-played Narnia, have even taken Narnia-born OCs into other stories, but Narnia itself is something that I'm not entirely comfortable with ficcing. It's almost too sacred for me._

_This mini-fic was originally posted in my Livejournal at sapphirebreeze-dot-livejournal-dot-com-slash-104937-dot-html_


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